Ask the Experts / Where To Start

I know this is sort of a noobie Question but since coming across this site i have realised how far i have still got to go to becoming anywhere close to some of you guys.

What i would like to know is where can i find articles or somthing along those lines teaching pretty much the basics. as the ones i have came across are just pish in stature to this site.

Ross.

First, welcome to NE.

- look at the accolade-parks/designs, which are uploaded here
- look at H2H parks
- visiting this forum is always helpful, when you have problems/questions
- start to build some things and post them here
-> you'll get some feedback, which will make you better...hopefully.

hey ross, welcome to ne

unfortunately there is no such guide anywhere. people usually just dive into the game by themselves. a general piece of advice i like to give though is to think before you build. know what you want to build and try to avoid improvisation. i'd say keep improvisation for later when you feel really comfortable and skilled with the game, but don't do it as a beginner. so basically, have a building concept and a vision of what you want to create. ideally, this vision is a real life vision, not an rct vision. the art is to translate your vision to rct through clever ways and methods.

This might help aswell.

i'd start by doing some simple problem solving activities just to get your eye in. find some pictures of real life architecture, and build it in RCT. use what objects you have to create what you see. if it doesn't look the same, thats fine! sometimes it just isn't possible. maybe it will help you, it definately helped me.

Posting loads of pictures of your rct creations here in the Advertising District, get comments on it and improve. The tip from Sammy is good too, use real life pictures to get the detailing in your work to the level your want. 

Yes, the key to improve is posting lots of screens to get lots of feedback. This doesn't mean you have to post screens of every single tile you finished, the more finished the screen the more useful the feedback. Don't obey to the feedback but consider everything.

Discussion RCT, Ask the Experts, and the Ad District are where most of the help is here. Discussion RCT has topics about trainers which you'll want to get acquainted with as well as topics discussing how we like to make parks. Ask the Experts has a lot of helpful tutorials on hacking ideas. And the ad district is where we all exchange screenshots of works in progress for comments and criticism. There's a lot to sort through there so pace yourself. Don;t try to learn it all in one night.

Also if you go through the parkmaker pages at this site, a lot of them have parks posted in chronological order. For most of us it takes a lot of practice to get to a place where you're producing work that might get considered for a spotlight. For someone just starting out, looking at those parks without that context might be a little intimidating. But if you look at the older parks by all the recognized parkmakers you can see the progression of skill levels it took to get there. Of course most of those early parks were made with the first game so if you have RCT2 only that might not help you much.

Making a spotlight is mostly about little steps -- improving your coasters, improving your use of trees and theming, improving your park layouts and architecture, using trainers to change how the mechanics of the game work. We all work on each of those areas one park at a time and then when you're ready for something really ambitious you put everything you've learned into one park and submit it for spotlight. Don't worry so much about comparing yourself to what other people are doing. If you focus on your own improvement you'll eventually get there. The great thing about a place like NE is that all these other people are here to share ideas, offer criticism, and offer praise when it's deserved.

Dont look at spotlight and try and be as good as them. You will be quickly discouraged, so find something a little easier or at a smaller scale to work of. This way you wont get disouraged. If your into realistic parkmaking I would reccomend JDP's Hutchinson Amusement Park as a good base. Its a good, solid park with lots of nice details and things. While its not the best or most detailed park its "solid" per se, with no tricky hacks or anything and is very inspiring to newer and intermediate level players. Just dont try to make coasters as good, you never will

Its all about baby steps.

Edited by Austin55, 12 April 2010 - 07:09 PM.